THE AGE OF REASON

I am not sorry for using a yet another provocative title which might trigger my liberal elite friends or rather my liberal elite acquaintances. But I am following the ways of my Favorite philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I stand by my title. Here's how.  People, who today talk about mental health, try to club therapy and spirituality under the same box. They try to sell a sort of cocktail of meditation, positive affirmations, law of attraction and therapy under the same tagline, "Good for mental health". But This is the same as when one says, boiled chicken, Chicken curry, Chicken Mughlai and other chicken dishes are healthy for you. The thing to note here is that they are different things and on different levels affect our mental health. On one hand, these stupidities like law of attraction and positive affirmations are bull crap pseudoscience, On the other hand, Adhyatm, or the science of self-knowledge is like salad for your mental health. Let us expand.  Psychology, till now,...

Again, a disclaimer. I have not written the title like, "Is all human behavior a cheap mimicry?" I am declaring that human emotions are a cheap mimicry. But who do we mimic? What does this signify? Is there any realness or any justification of emotional impulses anymore?   A story by Leo Tolstoy, I recall, where a father is crying on the death of his son. Suddenly, he finds a letter of his wife's illicit lover in which it was written that this son, which he was considering all this while his own, is actually an illicit child of their sexual intercourse. All his tears change to fury. He cannot take it anymore. He has been betrayed, at least this is what he feels.  Now, the wrong question to ask here is whether his anger was justified or not. The right question, however, is what was that drama and that crying all about? He never loved the person, his son. He never loved the son. He loved the "his". He loved him because he was his son. Now, you may ask everyone tak...

It is very common among people to bond over negative feelings like jealousy and insecurity. Today's mental health discourse has had many benefits but a few concerns. Today, the traits which were assumed wrong in the traditional ideology like: Jealousy and lust are morally neutralized today. "How dare you judge me?", "how dare you tell me what is wrong in me?", "...As if you are so perfect!".  The thing is, I believe we have successfully crushed the moral police of the society and rightfully so. And no one should tell other people how an ideal person should be. But don't you think one should strive to be a better person? You might argue that people try. I think they don't. I have reasons to believe so.  1. The market de-incentivizes morality. Because market rewards merit at any cost and not something which cannot have a market value.  2. Perversion of morality and moral values by selling them as soft skills. Have you read those books like 48 law...

I will be honest here in a pretending manner. I have read this book two times already since childhood. The reason why I was drawn to Gandhi was because of hatred. My family has an ideological hatred with this guy. The first book I ever read was "Why I Killed Gandhi" by Nathuram Godse and it is a celebrated book in my household till now. I really hated him but also intrigued how can a person like him (in hate) fool an entire population? Then I read this book in 10th standard. I did not understand the book for the first time. I found it similar to morality textbooks we read in RSS schools. I was disturbed by the level of confessions in there. After some time, my grandfather burned that book scolding me why I brought this book in the first place.  My second reading of that book was in my graduation when I took that book to understand the mindset of the man after I read about his conflicts with Ambedkar. I was in Hugh influence of Ambedkar at that time and that reading was also a...

People around the world and around me as well accuse philosophers, theorists, problem conceptualizers as for emphasizing on the bad and not acknowledging the good. People who know me, know me as one who sees only the negative and cannot speak anything non-nuanced. They say, I have a bad habit of philosophizing everything or rather theorizing everything. This, I see as the same accusation as Noam Chomsky once did of Slavoj Zizek. He said, "What he does is theory! Theory means nothing today!"   I feel a weird analogy between these accusations and the accusations of the Catholic church on Galileo when he gave the heliocentric model. Isn't this the same line of story? The church said," NO FACT CHECKING PLEASE!" and People say to theorists, "No theory please!" People somewhat think that they are otherwise living a happy life and then a theorist comes and creates a fiction of problems that don't really exist. But the fact remains, Galileo begs pardon and...

 You know true fiction is in the facts. The way facts become fictionalized during the process of saying it is actually the place of sublimation, that is where, objective truth actually becomes subjective. Among these sublime fictionalized facts, are inter-generational stories that one generation narrates to the next generations. These stories serve dual aim, the parent generation wants to convey the generational wisdom to the young generation, the second aim, which I take out of it, it can represent the histories of the Sub-altern that got lost because they were not that eminent to be known. History should not be limited to the major events and the dialectical macro-movements but rather some stories which has no contributing content to major scheme of things, but they do matter because it is fun to read them, know them and smile about them.  One such story My grandfather says every time I taunt him why he wears torn and wearied out clothes when he has decent clothes in the cup...

                         "If Truth shall kill me, let me die!"  The real quote is, "If truth shall kill them, let them die." But this is not what a true Adhyatmika, the true Dharmic person would say. This is not what Socrates would say. A true Dharmic man will die for truth. He will take it on him.  Let me ask you a question, what is more important for you? Truth or family relations? Truth or friendships? Truth or career? Truth or desires? Truth or your best dreams? Moral relativists will try to fog it under personal choice but let me make this clear to you that I am a no nuance guy. At least, not at inappropriate places. The reality is most of us can sell our truths just to save some relations. But ask some person who just understood his true gender identity and now has to fight everybody including his family. He has to confess otherwise he will suffocate that he is gay or bisexual or an...

  It has been a long time I have been in the Adhyatmika discourse. Srimadh Bhagvat Geeta, Ashtavakra Geeta, Tao te Ching and Dhammapada ka a few discourses I have been exposed to by my Guru, Osho Rajneesh. Along with that, as my Guru said to me once, choose one of these discourses as your master discourse and follow that. As I found myself closer to the discourse of Buddhism, I started Vipassana meditation. So, in a nutshell, this is till now, a summary of my "Adhyatmika Discourse". As I do not like the way Aadhyatma is presented by its practitioners in India, I have tried numerously to clarify it to my friends and family although it was all in vain because, I think they either reduce it to some high heavenly principle or they disregard it as some religious dogma. Most of my peers consider spirituality as a philosophical discourse. Others think it is a diversion of mind from the main tasks of life such as career making. I have certain points in my mind which I will try to put...

 Recently, I have achieved a successful culmination of a series of observations that I would like to present here. It is about something I like to call Violent confidence.  Have you ever been fat-shamed? Have you ever been subjected to a comment for being non-usual? If you have, congratulations, you will understand this phenomenon easily. Mostly, we are bound to be confused about life. Life, in a nutshell, is like a novel that we begin to read from the middle. We are born in a particular socio-cultural and economic setup. Our features, from how we speak to how we look, is governed by natural and cultural factors we have mostly no agency over. But, because of the Hegemonic structure of the society with respect to any characteristics, namely, a particular feature, a particular demeanor etc. We feel an obligation and a sort of pressure to be like that. To speak in a particular way, to look in a particular way, etc. ' Violent confidence is a kind of subjective violence, a term coi...

                                                            NOT THIS  Javed Akhtar, in a recent speech of his, was asked about the recent film, "Animal", to which he had replied, "Hero of any generation represents two things of that generation: The contemporary aspiration and that contemporary morality." The Protagonist, and not the Hero, as Hero is a word with Fascist tendencies. The Protagonist, in any age represents the current aspiration as well as current morality.  Who is the Protagonist of today? Today's society is confused about the contemporary morality; however, it was never ever surer about contemporary aspirations. Someone wants to be a millionaire, someone wants to be an academic, someone wants to be a bureaucrat, someone wants to earn respect in s...

It was a common sight in Indian Universities to see Marxists and Communists all around. Now a days, Indian universities see a shift to the right and a beyond right leanings. What I mean by a beyond right leaning is the deviation from the binary and an undermining attempt to mock the binary. Now, to clarify, not a supporter of Binary either but in this context the alignment of people with this kind of thought process entails behind itself a person whose Intellectual caliber I am most attracted these days. I say, Michel Foucault, is the Universal of the particularities that we see today, the path to the pathless and the path breakers who deliberately deliberate.  In earlier times, it was quite easier. You had a Bourgeois ideology and thinkers used to critique it. Then came, Foucault, who saw the critiques as the symptoms and not the cures. This demolished the binary of the oppressed and oppressor and in some sense the binary itself took the place of the oppressor with every individua...

I wrote it after a sweet experience of is-ness after a Bhajan. Life, as it is, seems quite incomprehensible to us. Too much of everything. Too much of things, too much of people, too much of emotions and too much of reason. The best description of life, as it is, should be Everywhere, everything, all at once. Things exist, and from those things arise man which can comprehend itself and its is-ness.  Is-ness is a quality of the man. The capability to be able to acknowledge how existing feels like, it is a unique feature of the man. Stones cannot describe is-ness. From is-ness, a need for meaning arises. A dire need to formulate why we are able to comprehend so much.  From meanings, arise a need of articulation and from that arises language. Language worships meanings through words. Words create, in turn, their own symbolic or otherwise meanings. These meanings have a world of their own. One meaning that arose due to is-ness, another meaning which was the cause of language and t...

I wanted to always write on abstract philosophical topics. Someone asked the great patriot Lala Lajpat Rai, "What will you do after India gets independence?", to which He replied, "I am a schoolteacher. I will teach." This is exactly my attitude. As a writer, I like to write on theory, the more abstract and non-useful, the better it is for me. Why, if you ask me, I have less obligations to be correct here. When we try to analyze society and politics, there is a sort of constraint that your analysis should be correct. This correctness, I despise. People do not read through texts. They do not deal with in between textual stuff. Anyhow, here I am, writing about my favorite philosopher's favorite philosopher's one of the favorite tools, Dialectic reversals.  Let me begin with a joke. This will explain what I mean by Dialectical reversals. An UPSC aspirant qualifies civil services exam and goes to the ultimate Mecca, which is ironically in Mussoorie in Uttarakhan...